Posts Tagged VDI

Everywhere you look, there are articles and analysts celebrating the “post PC” era that we’re entering. After all, with PC sales in decline and tablet shipments rising, we must be entering a new era, right? Quite possibly, but I don’t see the new era as being one in which PCs are relegated to the sidelines as has-been devices. In fact, I see the PC-experience as taking on new life in a multitude of new forms in what I prefer to call the PC+ Era.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI has long been kind of the lesser flashy sidekick to server virtualization and the cloud. We often hear so much about virtualization, and especially the cloud, because they are flashy, they do have that element of consumerization of IT. VDI however has been making consistent increased presence in the enterprise for a number of years now. For some organizations, it can be complicated to ingest the kind of changes that VDI introduces and the advantages it brings about. VDI products typically build on virtualization platforms, and that is one sure advantage. It also delivers improvements and efficiencies to the enterprise environment that is changing the ways a lot of environments are conducting business.

Last week, Storage Networking World (SNW), the “World’s Largest Storage, Data Center and IT Infrastructure Conference” brought together a couple thousand people to hear the latest in storage optimization and innovation. With the big trends of virtualization, convergence and cloud computing, it is without a doubt that the role of the storage administrator is evolving. While streamlining roles can help improve operational expenses, when it comes to storage, data availability and data integrity must be maintained. There are a number of solutions that are looking to transform and potentially chip away at the traditional storage administrator’s role.

How much time do you usually spend thinking about your desktop? If you work for a company, there is some corporate policy and some piece of hardware and software that allows you to do your job. Having worked for a few large corporations and being familiar with infrastructure and computers, I thought I knew a thing or two about desktops. I’m also quite familiar with desktop virtualization (and got good feedback on my recent post about some of the opportunities and challenges in the industry). Yesterday, I got to meet Brian Madden who is a true desktop expert. The desktop ecosystem is much broader than I had realized. His stump speech resonated with what we heard on the recent Wikibon peer incite, that desktop virtualization much more than “VDI” and significantly different than server virtualization. The change in the desktop market must start with the application and can include everything from cloud and mobile implications.

In a recent Wikibon Peer Incite on VDI, Rob Peglar, Senior Fellow at Xiotech Corporation joined the call and outlined why storage is such a difficult challenge for successful VDI deployments. Here is video of that segment of the call:

Corporate desktop environments have grown in utility and complexity over the last few decades.

This has lead to a difficult support environment for IT organizations; constantly having to deal with patches, upgrades and a variety of hardware and software issues.

Enter Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – IT organizations can once again take control of management and security of the corporate desktop while also freeing the users by giving them a consistent experience across an expanded range of hardware.

The future of the corporate desktop is a flexible end-user experience with a cost-effective centralized management.

Going into VMworld this year, I wanted to hear from customers and vendors the real state of desktop virtualization (also called virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI). Server virtualization may have hit a tipping point in 2009 (with more virtual applications deployed than physical applications), but while VDI has been talked about a lot, actual customer adoption has been slow. The solutions for virtualizing desktops are continuing to improve and the management of end-user devices will become more important to IT organizations with the added dynamic of increased mobile and tablet usage.